Thursday, September 1, 2011

Decapitation

A friend of THOIA requested a rare Ajax / Farrell decapitation story that unfortunately I do not have (nor do any of my compadres in horror), but as luck would have it, recently I aquired a rather mangled copy of the July 1953 issue of Weird Terror #6 which does contain a rather mean-spirited decap tale by Kenneth Landau. Overstreet mentions this issue as containing "Dismemberment, decapitation, man hit by lightning." Okay, hands up: Whose mom would throw a fit about a man getting hit by lightning in a comic book??!! I think I would've mentioned "iron poker to the face" before the lightning.

18 comments:

I can't pin it down right now, but there was a story, probably from EC, that served as the inspiration for this one. In that other story, the idea was that a quiz show prize would be buried where a contestant had hidden a body.

Great one! Seriously; it's just too bad this wasn't a EC (so far as I know!) effort! If it were; (with a little adjustment, i.e. TV instead of radio quiz show, but, then I'm guessing this was written before TV was everywhere instead of being, say, like 3-D TV or Internet TV now); this could have been on that old HBO "Tales From The Crypt" show! :)

>got a big laugh when you referred to the story as: "a rather mean-spirited decap tale".

Glad I could be here to amuse you, Jim... so what'a you sayin', I'm funny or something? You think I'm a funny guy?

>Fun tale! Thanks for posting!

That's what we do around here Diandra, put the fun back into decapitations.

>For a story titled "Decapitation" there's a conspicuous lack of any actual decapitation.

If you look at the cover it also mentions "cemeteries and shrunken heads." While there is a story called "Cemetery" in this issue, there's no actual cemetery anywhere in the story. No shrunken heads anywhere between the first and last pages either! Or vampire bats!

>this could have been on that old HBO "Tales From The Crypt" show!

Or maybe even a Hitchcock Hour or Night Gallery episode too!

Thanks for the comments, I was pretty sure everyone would enjoy this one.

I am finding myself curiously drawn to that crazy waterfowl panel on page two. It's just so incredibly odd. I mean, the whole story has a weird look to it--side by side panels with drastically different inking styles, odd color choices that are impossibly misaligned in only part of the page, etc.--but that picture with the park bench and the duck is just surreal.

The EC story "Decapitation" called to mind for me was "In Each and Every Package," which appeared in Crime SuspenStories #22. Here's the Wikipedia description:

"A man dismembers his wife and buries the pieces in his back yard. He and his lover, who has had plastic surgery in order to stand-in for his wife, get tickets to a quiz show called 'Treasure Hunt'. They are chosen as contestants and the host tells him that they're digging up his back yard in order to hide the prize money."

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